“Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks!” blared the headline of an October issue of the tabloid Bild, Germany’s largest daily paper and the flagship of the right-wing Springer media empire. Since the onset of the Eurocrisis, the German ruling class has been pursuing a two-pronged strategy: a punishing regime of neoliberal austerity for Greece and other nations of the Eurozone periphery, and a relentless racist campaign at home to win the consent of the German population. Attempting to shift blame for the crisis away from German banks and onto “lazy” and “corrupt” Greeks “living beyond their means,” the elite is coaxing the German public, already suffering from decades of stagnant wages (a beggar-thy-neighbor policy that is the dirty little secret behind of the famous “export powerhouse”) to stand behind a policy of foisting even deeper misery on Greece.

Only one party represented in the German Bundestag has openly rejected both the ideology of austerity and the nationalist narrative of a hard-working Mitteleuropa surrounded by a shiftless periphery. The Left Party (Die Linke) has consistently championed a position of solidarity with Greek people while placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of the European political and economic elite. Rejecting the crisis-era discourse of national unity while seeking broad support in the German population, Die Linke represents a precarious balance of realpolitik and radical principals in some ways resembling the classical prewar Social Democratic Party (SPD). Last October, in a choice freighted with historical significance, the party held its first programmatic congress in the town of Erfurt, the site of the historic 1891 SPD congress whose Marxist program would define the tenets of “classical” European socialism for generations.

The Left Party, however, is not strictly speaking an “Erfurtian” party. Despite the symbolic resonance of the congress’s chosen site, Die Linke does not represent an unmediated return to prewar socialism, a “union of the labor movement and socialism.” It is more accurate to understand the Left Party as being much more a product of the dissolution of the classical workers’ movement and socialism. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the “end of history,” the main parties of the workers’ movement in Europe took leave of their traditional worldviews: social-democratic and labor parties surrendered completely to neoliberalism while former Communist parties moved to occupy the space thus left vacant, often as junior partners in governmental coalitions led by those very same neoliberalized social-democratic parties. Die Linke is not one of those social-democratized ex-Communist parties; it is, for lack of a better word, a sort of postmodern pastiche of the various tendencies of the traditional workers’ movement.